Chapter 14. Pods have control of their own fate

The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength
of each member is the team.

—PhilJackson

The core building block of a podular organization is the pod: a
small, autonomous unit that is authorized to represent the company and
deliver results to customers. Pods are flexible, fast, scalable, and
resilient.

What is a Pod?

A podular organization is designed so that decisions and changes
can be made as quickly and as close to customers as possible. There is
no way for people to respond and adapt quickly if they have to get
permission before they can do anything.

If you want an adaptive company, you will need to unleash the
creative forces in your organization, so employees have the freedom to
deliver value to customers and respond to their needs more
dynamically. One way to do this is by enabling small, autonomous units
that can act and react quickly and easily, without fear of disrupting
other business activities: pods.

A pod is a small, autonomous unit that is enabled and empowered
to deliver the things that customers value.

Process to Pod

Traditionally, it’s been the job of managers to coordinate
activity across divisions or lines of business, because processes are usually complex and interdependent.
Making changes in one part of the process might solve a problem for
that unit but cause problems for others.

The goal of podular design is to reduce that interdependency by enabling autonomous teams to focus on clear outcomes that ...

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